Carolina QuotesNot a single one of our ancient sources indicates that Jesus was married, let alone married to Mary Magdalene. All such claims are part of modern fictional reconstructions of Jesus' life, not rooted in the surviving accounts themselves. The historical approach to our sources may not be as exciting and sensationalist as fictional claims about Jesus (he kept a lover! he had sex! he made babies!), but there's something to be said for knowing what really happened in history, even if it is not as titillating as what happens in novels.
Bart D. Ehrman Carolinian
Source
Ch. 7: 'Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and Marriage'
- work
- Truth and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code (2004)
- year
- 2004
Cite this record
“Not a single one of our ancient sources indicates that Jesus…” Bart D. Ehrman. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-C4E5E52ADF. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/c4e5e52adf
More from Bart D. Ehrman
Many Christians don't want to hear this, but the reality is that there are lots of other explanations for what happened to Jesus that are more probable than the explanation that he was raised from the dead. None of these explanations is very probable, but they are more probable, just looking at the matter historically, than the explanation of the resurrection. ... Historians can only establish what probably happened in the past, and by definition, miracles are the least probable of occurrences.
Very few people who devote their lives to studying the historical Jesus actually want to find a Jesus who is completely removed from our own time. What people want ... is relevance.
It is one thing to say that the originals were inspired, but the reality is that we don't have the originals—so saying they were inspired doesn't help me much, unless I can reconstruct the originals. Moreover, the vast majority of Christians for the entire history of the church have not had access to the originals, making their inspiration something of a moot point. Not only do we not have the originals, we don't have the first copies of the originals. We don't even have copies of the copies of the originals, or copies of the copies of the copies of the originals. What we have are copies made later—much later. In most instances, they are copies made many centuries later. And these copies all differ from one another, in many thousands of places. As we will see later in this book, these copies differ from one another in so many places that we don't even know how many differences there are. Possibly it is easiest to put it in comparative terms: there are more differences among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament. Most of these differences are completely immaterial and insignificant. A good portion of them simply show us that scribes in antiquity could spell no better than most people can today.